Inspirations - Nightmare of Eden

1979 saw the tenth anniversary of the writing partnership known as "the Bristol Boys" - who were Bob Baker and Dave Martin. After writing a crime drama together that year, the pair decided to go their separate ways. Martin wanted to write novels and plays, whilst Baker wanted to get into TV production.
Season 16 had seen the 15th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and the BBC had thrown a party at TV Centre to which Baker had been invited. He got talking to Graham Williams who informed him of Douglas Adams taking over the script editor role on the programme - and that he was looking for story ideas. They needed to be hard science fiction, and cheap.
Baker had written a well-received episode of the hard-hitting BBC crime drama Target - "Big Elephant", which had been directed by Douglas Camfield and had starred Katy Manning as a drug addict. He thought that it would be interesting to have drug addiction as a theme for a Doctor Who story. As the series had been forced to pull back on overt horror and violence, Baker thought that the BBC might not be keen on such an adult theme in a family show, and so was surprised when Williams and Adams told him to proceed.

Baker then added other elements which interested him. There would be a disaster movie plot inspired by the Airport films, and he also wanted to include a couple of personal bugbears - the difficulty in trying to get new car insurance, and horrible package holidays which he had experienced.
Airport had been a very popular movie in 1970, with an all star cast. It was about a snowbound airport having to deal with an approaching aircraft on which there was a passenger with a bomb. The film was based on a blockbuster novel by Arthur Hailey. It spawned three sequels - Airport 75 (in which a small aircraft crashes into the cockpit of a Boeing 747 - like the Hecate hitting the Empress), Airport 77 (a 747 crashes underwater) and Airport 79 - The Concorde (a Concorde gets hit by an out of control missile). It also inspired the Airplane movies.
These elements led to the set up for Nightmare of Eden. A supposedly luxurious passenger liner called Empress comes out of hyperspace in the wrong location above the planet Azure thanks to the navigator being off his face through use of a highly addictive and ultimately fatal narcotic named Vraxoin. As a result, it collides with a smaller survey ship called Hecate, and the two vessels become fused together. Vraxoin had a chemical name abbreviated to XYP, which people called "Zip". Lalla Ward objected to this name as it sounded like the exciting sort of thing children might want to take, so Vraxoin it became, although its longer chemical name could still be abbreviated to XYP in dialogue.
We see that most of the passengers sit in cramped berths, wearing silver overalls and dark glasses - suggesting that they are exposed to something like solar radiation. Later, when the Mandrel swamp monsters go on the rampage, the drug addled captain laughs as he watches these passengers being attacked. They are only steerage passengers, so who cares. The monster suits are so bad when seen fully that this sequence might also be a comment on the programme itself - viewers laughing at monsters attacking people rather than being scared or horrified.

The more important passengers aren't confined to the berths but instead have a spacious lounge to hang out in, and don't have to wear the protective gear - though we only ever see two. These are the scientist Tryst and his assistant Della. Tryst is played by Lewis Fiander, who decides to give his character the most extreme comedy German accent yet heard in the programme. As the "About Time" books claimed, perhaps he and Professor Marius of the Bi-Al Foundation, creator of K9, both attended the Ingolstadt University for Mad Scientists.
Tryst has invented a device called the CET machine - Continuous Event Transmuter. This allows sections of a planet's surface to be scooped up and saved on a laser crystal, where the flora and fauna continue to thrive. For some reason, all the planets they have visited appear to have names consisting of only three letters apart from the last one they went to - Eden. Presumably the three letters are abbreviations, so they can fit on the control dial. We see images of some of these planets on a view screen. They'll look familiar to fans of the first season of Space:1999, as clips from some of its episodes are used here - including Guardian of Piri and Matter of Life and Death.
Della tells the Doctor and Romana that one of their team was killed on Eden, a man named Stott.

The collision has resulted in a number of spatial distortions on the Empress, and also allowed the Mandrels to escape from the CET machine via its view screen. They are now roaming around the ship, killing anyone they come across. The Mandrels had originated on Eden. Stott was only ever presumed dead - killed by the Mandrels or the hostile plant life there. The Doctor and Romana have claimed to be insurance and salvage investigators, but Captain Rigg of the liner checks the company they say they work for and found that it went into liquidation 20 years ago. When challenged about this, the Doctor simply says that it is no wonder they haven't been paid recently.
He decides to investigate the Vraxoin smuggling. It must be on this ship, but scans don't show anything. Matters are complicated when a pair of officious customs officers from Azure arrive, and decide that the Doctor is the smuggler. (Both have appeared in the programme before. Fisk is Geoffrey Hinsliff, who had been Jack Tyler not that long ago in Image of the Fendahl. Costa is Peter Craze, who had appeared in The Space Museum and The War Games, and was also the brother of Michael Craze, who had played 60's companion Ben Jackson).
One of the Mandrels is accidentally electrocuted and its body decomposes rapidly into a grey ash - pure Vraxoin. It would be interesting to learn how someone first found out that the corpses of swamp monsters on a primordial planet produced a narcotic...

The director assigned to this production was the veteran Alan Bromly, who had only ever directed one previous story - The Time Warrior. This is, of course, regarded as a classic, so you would have thought that he was a safe pair of hands. Not so. That first Sontaran story had been virtually a period piece, with little in the way of special effects. Bromly assumed that production of the sow had improved since his last story, when in fact it had become more complex. He was also very old-fashioned in his ways - just at the time when Tom Baker was really making his views known during the making of the programme. Director and star did not get on at all and during the final recording block things came to a head. During the final evening's recording, the cast and crew were given an extended dinner break and returned to the studio to find Bromly gone. Graham Williams stepped in to handle the recording himself.
The VFX team were also unhappy, but this was because Williams had come up with a budget saving idea to record the models on video in the studio on the night using CSO, rather than have them specially filmed elsewhere as in previous years. The costumes for the Mandrels worked fine when the creatures were lurking in the gloomy jungle environment of the Eden CET projection, but were laughable when seen in the overly-lit sets of the space liner. They also started to fall apart quite quickly, and we see the white padding material showing through the outer layer on several occasions. When production had completed, one of the crew had T-shirts printed with "I Survived the Nightmare of Eden".

The story wraps up with the reveal that Stott was really a space security officer investigating Tryst's expedition as a source of Vraxoin smuggling, and he wasn't killed after all. He has been hiding in the Eden CET projection. Tryst is the smuggler, planning to get the drugs off the liner by transferring the Eden projection to his accomplice - the pilot of the Hecate. The Doctor uses the CET to trap the pair in Tryst's own machine when the pair try to flee.
Before this can happen, the Doctor has to lure the Mandrels back into the CET projection then stabilise it to prevent them from getting out again. He uses K9's dog whistle to round them up, and this leads to one of the sequences most cited in criticism of the programme during this period, and highlighting Tom Baker's descent into silliness. He goes into the projection and disappears from view as the monsters follow him in. We then hear him cry out: "Oh my fingers! My arms! My legs! My everything!" before emerging with his coat ripped to shreds. Tom clearly thought this was funny, but he's in a minority of one I'm afraid.
This would prove to be Bob Baker's final contribution to Doctor Who, though he has attempted to launch K9 in spin-off vehicles on numerous occasions. A new production team would soon be on its way, one which wanted to employ only new writers. Baker has claimed that he wrote to Russell T Davies when he heard the programme was coming back in 2005, but never got a response. Another new production team, only wanting to use new writers.
Nightmare of Eden proved to the final straw for Graham Williams. He had always had a rather stormy relationship with Tom Baker, whom he felt tried to boss him around and generally disrespected his authority. Things had come to a head earlier in the year when Williams had almost sacked his star, and his BBC bosses had initially agreed with him - though they backtracked when they remembered how popular he was. Baker in turn had threatened to resign on a couple of occasions. This time it was Williams who handed in his resignation. Season 17 would be his last.
Next time: Anthony Read is back with more Greek myths. However, Christmas is approaching and everyone else thinks it's panto season...